7 JANUARY 2006, Page 7

I n their New Year newspaper advertisement in the Sunday Telegraph ,

the Conservatives say, ‘The right test for our policies is how they help the least well-off in society, not the rich.’ That is a good approach, but will it be invariably applied? For example, the clearest way that the rich are privileged in modern Britain is not through the tax system, which even now penalises them more than the poor, but through the planning acts. Because it is extremely hard to build new houses anywhere, particularly in beautiful places, the price of existing houses rises all the time, particularly the price of large and beautiful houses. This gives a vast advantage to those who bought their houses a long time ago, or who inherited them, or who are rich for other reasons, and it makes life extremely difficult for the least well-off. But there is nothing more sacred to Tory constituency associations, particularly in the south, than the idea that no new house-building should take place. David Cameron is pushing a green agenda, and we can all agree that we would like a cleaner, healthier, more beautiful environment. But most green policies — e.g., Prince Charles’s attacks on what he calls our ‘obsession with cheap food’ — hit the poor much harder than the rich. If David Cameron can find a way through this, he will be a great prime minister.

Max Egremont’s interesting new biography of Siegfried Sassoon (Picador), the first to have had full access to Sassoon’s private papers, brings one up against the strange fact that the impulse of poets who attack war is very similar to that of those who glorify it. Both are very excited by war, both see it as a heightened reality which inspires their imaginations; they differ only in the opinion that they finally give about it. But opinion is not very important in poetry, not even in vehement poetry, and so the anti-war Sassoon is really very similar to the pro-war Sassoon who enlisted in 1914. Sassoon more or less said this himself when he later wrote, of his public statement of protest against the war in 1917, that ‘the impulse which caused me to perform the protest exploit was identical with that which led me to behave with reckless daring in the front line’. And so it was that the darling of the pacifists liked always to be known in his village as ‘the captain’.

As selection in state schools is debated yet again, horror stories about the 11-plus get recirculated. Although wholly in favour of selection, I do see that a final decision about a child’s educational future based on a single exam at 11 was a bad idea. But support for the 11-plus starts to well up within me whenever I hear the sob stories of famous people who failed it and say they feel scarred as a result. John Prescott is the most vocal of these, but would one honestly respect any exam which the Deputy Prime Minister was capable of passing? On the other side of the argument must be weighed the possibility that if young John had lived in the present age when everyone passes everything, he would not have been quite such a crosspatch.

Or possibly it was 11-plus failure that gave Mr Prescott his astonishing persistence. He just won’t leave people alone. John King, of British Airways fame, received a Christmas card from Mr Prescott last month, even though he died six months earlier.

At Christmas, a relation gave me a secondhand copy of Everyone’s Gone to the Moon, Philip Norman’s famous novel about journalism. I look forward to reading it, but so far I have got no further than the inside of the dustjacket. What struck me was the price. The book was published in hardback in 1995, and cost £15.99. Glancing at new hardback novels arriving in our house in the last month, I see that most of them cost £12.99. The difference is explained mainly by the disappearance of the Net Book Agreement. For years, publishers and writers used to proclaim that the NBA upheld literary values, good writing, small bookshops, etc. Actually, it merely did something that all lovers of literature should resent — it made books more expensive. It has never been easier to buy good books at good prices. But like so many triumphs of the free market, this goes unsung. Another little-noticed virtue of the market is that it makes people flexible and tactful. After all the controversy about Christmas cards that won’t mention Christmas, I was delighted to receive a Christmas card from Fat Osman, who once sold me a couple of carpets in the bazaar in Istanbul. Its message appeared in English, French and Turkish. In English (and French) the presumably Muslim Mr Osman conveys his ‘best wishes for Christmas’. I have got a kind friend to translate the Turkish message: it makes no mention of Christmas and simply wishes the recipient a happy new year.

When Michael Portillo was a member of parliament, it was quite exciting to read his journalism and watch his programmes on television. Not only did these performances prove the existence of the ‘hinterland’ which all politicians wish to display and few actually possess, they also had interest as devices by the author to position himself for his next political move. Now that Mr Portillo has become a full-time member of the trade, this tension has sagged. Last month I received a publicity email from him in which he announced his forthcoming radio programme called Natural Despots. ‘Discover how mean meerkats can be,’ he wrote, ‘and gasp at the fluctuating levels of testosterone amongst naked mole rats.’ This month he will present a programme called Michael Portillo Goes Wild in Spain. I fear the former Cabinet minister may suffer the modern equivalent of the fate of the Rector of Stiffkey in the 1930s. Unfrocked for various indecencies, he eventually became part of a circus act and was eaten by a lion in an amusement park in Skegness.

Skilled as a chairman of the Press Complaints Commission naturally is in exploiting the sheer laziness of journalists, Sir Christopher Meyer keeps saying that he will give the serialisation money for his memoirs to charity, and reporters faithfully record this as if it settled any question about a financial motive. He did this again when the head of the Foreign Office, Sir Michael Jay, told him that his judgment of the public interest in the matter might be ‘conditioned’ by the fact that ‘you have a commercial interest in the success of the book’. But Sir Christopher’s point about the serialisation is a suggestio falsi, for he will make money from the increased sales that come from the serialisation and, of course, from the advance. By the way, the very title of Sir Christopher’s book proves that he has betrayed the trust placed in him. It is called DC Confidential.